US partially declassifies top-secret NSA surveillance programs

On the same morning that the United States Senate grilled the nation’s top investigators about domestic surveillance, the Director of National Intelligence declassified three documents detailing those programs “in the interest of increased transparency.”

Wednesday morning, the director of public affairs for the DNI’s
office posted three files on the agency’s website pertaining to
the phone records mass tracking program exposed in June by former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Nearly three months after Mr. Snowden began releasing classified
intelligence documents, DNI Director James Clapper has approved
the release of three files further explaining how Section 215 of
the PATRIOT Act has allowed investigators to collect the phone
records of millions of Americans on a daily basis.

Among those files published Wednesday morning on the DNI website
are two reports on the NSA’s bulk phone data collection
program — one from 2009 and another from 2011 — and the primary
order for business records collection under Section 215 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The FISC document, formerly classified as “top secret,” explains
amid a series of redactions that the court can compel the
custodian of records at private businesses to produce for the NSA
on a daily basis “all call detail records or ‘telephony
metadata’” for all communications.

According to that document’s cover page, the court did not intend
on declassifying the document until April 12, 2038.

“DNI Clapper has determined that the release of these
documents is in the public interest,” DNI Director of Public
Affairs Shawn Turner said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee asked members of the
NSA, DNI and Federal Bureau of Investigation to answer questions
during a public hearing in Washington, DC held Wednesday morning
on Capitol Hill.

“Each and every program and tool is valuable,” FBI Deputy
Director Sean Joyce told members of the Senate, insisting that
intelligence gaps preceding the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks have since been narrowed following the adoption of the
PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act’s Section 702.

“We need to remember what happened [on] 9/11, and everyone in
this room remembers where they were and what happened,” Joyce
told the committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence since 2009, told her colleagues at the
hearing that “we would place this nation in jeopardy if we
eliminated these two programs.”

According to the contents of the 2011 Department of Justice
report declassified by the DNI on Wednesday, “Both of these
programs operate on a very large scale.”

“As noted,” the report continues, “these two collection
programs significantly strengthen the intelligence community’s
early warning system for the detection of terrorists and
discovery of plots against the homeland. They allow the
intelligence community to detect phone numbers and email
addresses within the United States that may be contacting
targeted phone numbers and email addresses associated with
suspected foreign terrorists abroad and vice-versa; and entirely
domestic collections between entities within the United States
tied to a suspected foreign terrorist attack.”

“NSA needs access to telephony and email transactional
information in bulk so that it can quickly identify and assess
the network of contacts that a targeted number or address is
connected to, whenever there is [reasonable articulable
suspicion] that the targeted number or address is associated
with…”

That paragraph — and many others throughout the disclosures —
ends with two lines of redactions obscuring the Justice
Department’s actual justification for surveilling Americans. Who
exactly is of particular interest to the US intelligence
community is of course an issue that the government has gone out
of its way to obscure. As RT reported recently, the Obama
administration says that while the US remains at war, the
identify of those on the receiving end is an issue far too sensitive to be shared with the public.